advertising

While programmatic ads continue to reshape the web advertising landscape, the market for advertising at public events still lags behind. HelloSponsor, which just launched after going through AngelPad’s accelerator, is looking to modernize event sponsorship for brands by simplifying the experience and building up metrics so that they can measure the impact of their campaigns. Read More

After years of questions about how it will make revenue, Pinterest’s roadmap to monetization is becoming more clear. The company announced today that its Promoted Pins program, which it made available in beta to certain brands eight months ago, has performed “just as good and sometimes better than organic Pins,” and it will make the program available to all advertisers on… Read More

Publishers have been offered a seriously raw deal in the war over content on the internet. Linking to another site is free, and there are few revenue sharing agreements between publishers and technology companies. Supported throughout the development of the internet by leading companies like Yahoo, Google, and Facebook, what might be termed the American model of content has largely won out… Read More

Giftgaming is a win-win-win that helps you win. Advertisers get exposure, developers get paid, and you get free virtual goods in mobile games plus coupons for discounts on meatspace purchases. Today, Giftgaming launched its service onstage at the TechCrunch Disrupt Europe in London. When you’re playing a mobile game like Fluid Football, you’ll be able to tap a Giftgaming icon for… Read More

The EU has approved Facebook’s landmark $19 billion acquisition of messaging startup WhatsApp — determining that the two are “not close competitors”. In a statement confirming the clearance, it highlights three key areas where it believes the two do not create an anticompetitive environment for other players in this space: consumer communications services… Read More

Quid had a good run, but it looks like we have a new champion in the endless battle to have the most pretentious startup website. West, an advertising agency founded by former Apple exec Allison Johnson in 2011 with backing from Jack Dorsey and Ray Chambers, has managed to claim that spot with a site that offers absolutely no information about who works there or what kinds of services they offer. Read More

The market for online video ads continues to grow rapidly as more advertisers shift their spending from TV to the web. Google unsurprisingly wants to own its share of this market. In order to court large brands who want to buy against premium online video content, the company today announced the launch of its own programmatic ad exchange for video ads under the name Google Partner Select. Read More

Apple has a lot of knowledge regarding its users, which it uses to improve its services and offerings, including names, addresses, locations and purchase histories. But what it doesn’t do with that data is share it with advertisers very freely. That makes Madison Avenue very mad, according to a new AdAge article detailing why Apple, and Amazon (which operates in a similar manner)… Read More

The recent scourge of shady app install ads that have been automatically redirecting users to the App Store brought to focus how difficult it is to monitor and manage today’s mobile ad ecosystem. Fingers were pointed everywhere – including at the app publishers, marketers and the ad networks, some of which tend to utilize shady tactics. Now, a company called The Media Trust is… Read More

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Dick Costolo, the CEO of Twitter, says that it’s easy enough for consumers to opt out of tailored ads on Twitter, but he does not know how many actually go through the process of doing so. “You can opt out of tailored ads and content,” he told an audience today. But asked how many percentage-wise have done so, he would not say: “I do not know how many people have opted… Read More

For many weeks now, mobile users on both iOS and Android have been encountering a problem where visits to certain websites and apps have automatically redirected them to the platform’s app store to download various games, like King’s “Candy Crush Saga” or Supercell’s “Clash of Clans,” for example. The issue involves errant ad networks, which should… Read More